A Knock at Midnight(100)
Everything changed in October 2017 when Alice, who understood the power of storytelling and the arts, took her fate into her own hands. She recorded a mic.com interview, telling viewers about her journey to prison for her first-ever conviction, the joy of being a grandmother, and her passion for prison mentorship. Alice is an incredible orator, and the response to the video was immediate and viral. It picked up traction on social media, shared by celebrities like Common and Jesse Williams.
Eventually, Kim Kardashian West saw Alice’s video on Twitter and was moved to both tears and action. She formed a legal team consisting of her personal attorney, Shawn Holley, Jennifer Turner, and Mike Scholl, a highly regarded attorney from Memphis, where Alice had been convicted. Alice asked me to join the team, and we immediately began to work together to formulate fresh ideas. With Kim on board, we had an exponentially larger platform to raise awareness and fight for Alice’s freedom. As I got to know Kim in meetings and phone calls, I was impressed by her genuine dedication, not just to use the power of her millions of fans and social media followers, but to dive deep into understanding the unfair laws that allowed for Alice to be sentenced to life. It was Kim’s idea to reach out to Ivanka Trump to try to secure a meeting with the president. Jennifer and I drew on our previous clemency experience under Obama to come up with a strategic plan and draft a compelling clemency petition. The entire process took months of late-night strategy sessions, lawyering, and intensive behind-the-scenes negotiations. On Alice’s sixty-third birthday, Kim Kardashian West met with Donald Trump to make an impassioned plea for Alice’s life and request that he grant clemency. One week later, on June 6, 2018, he did.
Her first day of freedom was a dizzying flurry of work. Suddenly, my small New York City hotel room became a mobile command center of one. After twenty-one years in prison, Alice Marie Johnson was coming home. Even before the news broke publicly, I had already called prison officials in Washington, D.C., to ensure that Alice’s release would be smooth and quick. I’d already spoken to her family to prepare them for the important logistics and the crush of media. Jennifer Turner and I had already cried tears of true joy, trying to wrap our minds around the tremendous effort we’d just been a part of. Most important of all, Kim and the legal team had called Alice to tell her President Trump had granted her clemency. As she cried and praised God at the news, I thought of the moment I met her at Carswell. I remembered her determined face marshaling women around at their rehearsal, using the arts to keep their hopes up. I remembered her despair when Genice died, as though a piece of herself had died, too. She had been so much for so many. And by the afternoon of June 6, 2018, she was running into her family’s arms, leaving her life sentence at the prison gates.
Sharanda and I cried on the phone that night. We shared a special kinship and pride over Alice’s release. Sharanda told me that when she saw the news footage of Alice running toward her family, she yelled at the screen, “Run, Ms. Alice, run! Before they change they damn minds!” We laughed with joy until our sides hurt.
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AFTER THE OVERWHELMING success of her campaign for Alice, Kim wanted to continue pushing to use her platform for justice. She took up Chris’s case, again seeking in-depth understanding of his situation. She secured another meeting with President Trump in order to advocate for Chris, and the media responded. For a week, Chris’s story was front-page news. His release seemed imminent. Eagerly, we waited. And waited. In the prison TV room, Chris watched his story splashed out over the screen, his photo side by side with Kim Kardashian’s. CNN, NBC, CBS, every entertainment show and network sported similar headlines: Who is Chris Young? Chris endured harassment from some of the guards, resentful of the media attention he was receiving. He tried to keep as low a profile as he could, although there was really no such thing anymore. But on the phone with me, he was exuberant. “Brittany, I’m gonna move to Austin. That’s like the third top tech hub in the nation, which means it will be the first soon! I’ve been working on my app and if I can just talk to some guys on the ground, I bet I can be ready to launch within six months for real.” On the day of Kim’s meeting with Trump, Big Mama, Chris’s surrogate grandmother and protector, was honored at her funeral in Clarksville. She had passed away that very week. I spoke to Chris every day during that time, urging him to hang on.
Though in his typical stoic way Chris downplayed his own trauma, the wait amounted to psychological torture. To endure a life sentence, hope and optimism are as essential as breath. Chris believed, like the rest of us, that he would be released any minute. But the minutes dragged on to months without relief. To give up belief that he might wake to freedom was not an option, but each day that passed led to crushing disappointment. Chris was trapped. And the loss of Big Mama, who he hadn’t seen since being transferred to federal prison, was a terrible blow. The mental fortitude he displayed in those few cruel months cannot be overstated.
Ultimately, it became clear that there would never be another Alice Johnson. After weeks of hearing nothing, our hopes for clemency faded. All three branches of Chris’s government—legislative, judicial, and executive—had failed him. But we pressed on, continuing to knock. I assembled a larger legal team, including two outstanding litigation attorneys, Jillian Harris and Drew Warth, both from top law firms, to help me seek relief through the courts.